AdaEnsemble Learning Approach for Metro Passenger Flow Forecasting

Accurate and timely metro passenger flow forecasting is critical for the successful deployment of intelligent transportation systems. However, it is quite challenging to propose an efficient and robust forecasting approach due to the inherent randomness and variations of metro passenger flow. In this study, we present a novel adaptive ensemble (AdaEnsemble) learning approach to accurately forecast the volume of metro passenger flows, and it combines the complementary advantages of variational mode decomposition (VMD), seasonal autoregressive integrated moving averaging (SARIMA), multilayer perceptron network (MLP) and long short-term memory (LSTM) network. The AdaEnsemble learning approach consists of three important stages. The first stage applies VMD to decompose the metro passenger flows data into periodic component, deterministic component and volatility component. Then we employ SARIMA model to forecast the periodic component, LSTM network to learn and forecast deterministic component and MLP network to forecast volatility component. In the last stage, the diverse forecasted components are reconstructed by another MLP network. The empirical results show that our proposed AdaEnsemble learning approach not only has the best forecasting performance compared with the state-of-the-art models but also appears to be the most promising and robust based on the historical passenger flow data in Shenzhen subway system and several standard evaluation measures.